It’s the holiday season and the stars are out in force in our fair city, some filming projects here, others merely stopping by for a little shopping. Take Halle Berry, for example, who flew in just to do some retail procuring (didn’t anyone tell her about the current exchange rate?). While here, the pregnant Berry also stopped into Absolute Spa for a chair massage, impressing the staff with her sweet demeanour.

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Hilary Duff

Hilary Duff was spotted last Wednesday night at Joeys Restaurant on Burrard Street, enjoying a glass of wine with her mom. The next day, Duff and her mother shopped at Holt Renfrew, where Hilary bought her mom a gift. Duff is in town filming Safety Glass, the story of a reporter who is sent to cover the Challenger Space Shuttle launch, only to become mixed up in the lives of some local students.

By now, everyone in town knows that the X-Files film sequel is in production. Spy photos of David Duchovny, along with co-star Amanda Peet, have already surfaced on the web, and you can expect sightings to increase over the holidays. Last week the production staged an enormous set piece featuring a nighttime foot chase running all the way from the downtown library to the West Side — we’re told for the film’s opening sequence — with camera set-ups on multiple rooftops. Details of the plot remain a closely guarded secret, but apparently the new film will avoid the series’ perplexing mythology and instead work as a standalone installment about some kind of supernatural mystery.

Meanwhile, David Duchovny’s manager was able to penetrate the actor’s “hotel fortress” here in Vancouver to alert him of his Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a TV comedy series. Duchovny, who stars in the Showtime series, Californication, remarked wryly, “She said it was an awards-related emergency.”